


Give the Devil His Due

by allyoops



Category: Original Work
Genre: 1940s, Courteous Rapist, Crying, F/M, Forced Orgasm, Manhandling, Manipulative Rapist, Post-War, fairy lore, happily married couple
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-13
Updated: 2020-12-13
Packaged: 2021-03-09 19:35:39
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,666
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27851802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/allyoops/pseuds/allyoops
Summary: Gwen knew better than to take gold coins from handsome men with beautiful smiles.Her husband did not.
Relationships: Mob Boss/Wife of the man who owes him money
Comments: 12
Kudos: 70
Collections: Consent Issues Exchange 2020





	Give the Devil His Due

**Author's Note:**

  * For [RobberBaroness](https://archiveofourown.org/users/RobberBaroness/gifts).



Gwen was working in the back room when Mr. Wiseman came. She would wonder forever after if her having been out in the shop with Chip might have prevented what followed, but there was no earthly way to know. By the time she emerged, dust rag still wrapped around her curls to keep the cobwebs out of her home permanent, Chip was already flipping the coin off his thumb with an air of undisguised pleasure.

“You’re in a good mood,” Gwen noted. Chip gave her his widest grin, the one where the dimple cut right into his cheek in the way that had made her go weak at the knees the first time she saw him at the GI Dance.

“Very best,” he said, and flipped the coin across the room without warning, so she fumbled her dust rag and barely caught it in time. “Know who was in here just now?”

Gwen took a considering look around the tiny shop but none of the display cases seemed in any way disarranged, so she could not guess the identity of a regular patron. She shook her head, smiling at Chip’s obvious enthusiasm, and confessed she was at a loss.

“Mr. Wiseman!” Chip exulted. Gwen’s hand closed a little more tightly around the coin. Chip did not notice.

“Oh?” she said, and crossed to place the coin on the counter. She thought she had repressed her shudder, but Chip saw, and some of his joy ebbed away.

“Come on, Gwennie, why do you have to be that way about him? He’s been a real help. He got the landlord off our back, didn’t he? And he was real good about me taking that long to repay him. Now that we’re on our feet again he’s just proud of us, is all. He wanted to do us a good turn.”

“He never expected us to be able to repay him,” Gwen said shortly. “He expected he’d be able to collect.”

“Collect what?” Chip laughed, gesturing around him at the narrow confines of the secondhand shop. “A bunch of old books and clothes? What would he want with that? And how could he collect anyway, until the shop starts to turn a profit? Naw, Gwen, he’s happy for us! Came by to say as much. Said he was surprised I got it together in time to pay him off, and he could see I was real good with money. Asked me to do him a little favour on top of it, and of course I said sure. We’d be glad to. And we will, won’t we? Least we can do, the way he did all that for us.”

Gwen could see how eager he was to believe it, and she could not find it in her heart to contradict him. So she pressed a kiss to the corner of his mouth, and said she had to get on with her dusting.

She did not ask about the favour.

~*~

Two weeks later Mr. Wiseman returned. He came in company with four strong men, all of his usual type: silent, sturdy and, Gwen was almost certain, human. Well, three of them were. The one at the back had a way about him that meant she could not look him right in the eye, and he avoided the pot-bellied stove that squatted square and trusty in the middle of the room, so she knew his type right enough.

“Good afternoon, children,” Mr. Wiseman said pleasantly enough, as Chip came hurrying around the corner of the counter to reach out and shake his hand. “I am glad to have found you in. Chip, I thank you kindly for watching my little coin for me while I was gone.”

“Of course, Mr. Wiseman,” Chip nodded. “We were happy to do it. Weren’t we, Gwen?”

Fear skated ice-tracks down the back of Gwen’s spine even before she could fully register what was going on. The flash of gold in Chip’s hand came racing back to her then, a dreadful warning far too late now that Chip stood there patiently, so expectant, so unsuspecting of what he himself had done that it almost made her gag with fear.

Fear for him, and fear for herself, given the way Mr. Wiseman glanced over at her now. Mr. Wiseman always had that way of looking at her, and Gwen knew what it meant, though she still did not know why.

“I’ll need it back, of course,” Mr. Wiseman said gently. “The coin.”

“Yes, sure, of course,” Chip said. He was starting for the safe, dear God, the coin. Gwen turned, the entire shape of the trap too clean and clear in the air before her to even be believed.

“Chip,” she said, her voice coming out high and thin, “Chip did he give you that coin?”

“Not to keep; just to watch,” said Chip, spinning the dial of the safe. “Said he was going out of town for a while. Asked if we could do him a favour. Keep it safe and then give him the coin back when he had finished the hunt—you a shooting man, Mr. Wiseman? I never knew that about you.”

“No and why would you,” said Mr. Wiseman, still smiling, still agreeable. Still looking right at Gwen. “I do not often discuss my private business in public.”

 _He can see me_ , Gwen thought, _he knows that I know. He doesn’t care. Why should he care? He’s got what he wants. Chip, Chip, you utter fool_.

Then she hated herself for the thought, and hated Mr. Wiseman for making her think it.

Chip had the safe open now. He took out a little wooden box, a carved thing Gwen had given him for his birthday, a gift she’d gotten herself from her old gran so many years ago. A box made of rowan, inlaid with iron and a bit of silver.

“It’s meant to keep things safe,” she’d told Chip when she gave it to him. He had not taken it seriously, she thought at the time, but she could see from his choice of it in storing the coin that he must have listened. Even if he’d only thought it symbolic, at least he’d _heard_. But he still had no idea, and even that box would not have been equal to what he’d placed inside it.

This terrible truth Chip saw for himself when he lifted the lid.

“What . . .” he said, and frowned. Took out the dead old twig, one withered leaf still attached, and stared.

Gwen _’_ s heart cracked at the sight.

“My goodness,” said Mr. Wiseman, still pleasant, still mild. “Chip, you seem to have quite a sense of humour. I do not think that is a gold coin. Surely not the little gold coin I gave you to keep for me, two weeks ago.”

“What . . .” Chip said again, frowning. He turned to look at the safe, then down at the box, and then looked up across the room to Gwen with a kind of ragged disbelief. “Gwennie, did you open the safe?”

Gwen never opened the safe. She wouldn’t touch it. It was an ugly, hulking thing that stank of damp and prisons and scared her, frankly. The way those bolts slammed home. But he asked her because he could not imagine what else the explanation could be, and she had to answer. Had to keep her voice light and calm.

“No,” she said. “No, Chip. I did not open the safe.”

“Well my goodness,” said Mr. Wiseman. The men he had come in with, and the man who was not quite, stood a little more squarely at his back. “Goodness me. What am I to think is going on here, Chip?”

He adjusted one of his fine leather gloves, delicately sinister, and Gwen ached to see the sweat stand out on Chip’s brow. Chip might not have known what Mr. Wiseman was in the truest sense, but he knew his reputation in town right enough. Everybody knew what Mr. Wiseman was as a businessman. He was the kind you did not get to cross twice.

“Mr. Wiseman,” he said raggedly. “Mr. Wiseman I swear, I never . . . I don’t know how it . . . you’ve got to believe me. I put it in there safe and sound. Haven’t touched it since. I don’t know—on my life, I don’t know where it’s got to. It must have been stolen.”

“Stolen,” said Mr. Wiseman, in tones of great and terrible gentleness. “What terrible misfortune. You’ve had burglars, then? Called the police?”

“We . . . no, we . . . no burglars.” Chip looked around him at the floor, as if expecting to see the coin rolling along the boards. “I don’t understand it.”

Gwen did.

Gwen did, but she could not bear to say.

“Chip,” she said, and marvelled that her voice could sound so calm, “ask Mr. Wiseman the value of his coin.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” Chip said, in the voice of one still badly dazed. “Mr. Wiseman, of course we’ll settle up. What is the value, if you please, of—of the coin?”

Mr. Wiseman looked at Chip quite steadily and named a sum which leeched every drop of colour from his face.

“I can,” he added, “produce documentation which attests to that fact.”

Of course he could. He would have made sure of that detail, and any other. Gwen’s head spun like a top. It was as if she were staring down a long, lighted corridor. At the end of the passage was a door, and in the door was set a key which would turn in the lock only in response to her hand.

She put her hand to the key, and turned.

“Mr. Wiseman,” she said, “that is more than we have. It’s more than our entire enterprise here is worth. We could give you every piece of merchandise in the shop and not cover more than half that sum. I think . . . I think you know it.”

He turned to her and smiled. A real smile, made all the more awful by the way it seemed that he truly _meant_ it. He was _glad_ to find her so sensible, the smile said. So ready to face reality and come to terms.

“I do.”

“Then what can we do?” said Chip. “How can we possibly make it right?”

Chip still did not understand. Could not understand what Mr. Wiseman was. Gwen wondered if, had she told him, he would even have believed her. Now she would never have the chance to know, because she could not go back to the time before it was too late and tell him then.

She looked at Mr. Wiseman and he looked back at her. They understood each other better than any two people in that room in the moment, and Gwen felt a wave of revulsion at their mutual understanding.

Mr. Wiseman smiled still. Not even unkindly, really, but knowing and grand and remote, _lordly_ , so that she felt small and underdressed and wished mightily she had not worn her apron today. But not even Sunday best could compare to the way Mr. Wiseman was dressed, the way he held himself with power without and within, so maybe it didn’t matter that much. No matter what she wore, when he looked at her like that Gwen knew she would always feel the nearest thing to naked.

“Chip,” she heard herself say, “you’ll have to . . . to wait downstairs. We’ll go up together, and . . . and it won’t . . .” her voice wobbled. She tried to finish the sentence but Mr. Wiseman stepped in to extend his hand, forcing her to place her fingers within it, and said the rest for her.

“We will be as long as we need to,” he said calmly. “It will not, down here, feel very much long at all.”

Gwen gave one little gasp, of understanding, of needing to steel her nerves. It was only at hearing her gasp that Chip seemed to understand what was unfolding in his own shop, under his very nose, with his wife and his double-dealing benefactor speaking miles above his head. He leaped forward, absolutely red-faced knuckles-bared fury, but was caught and restrained easily before he could even make contact with Mr. Wiseman’s face.

“Like Hell!” Chip raged, struggling to no profit at all in the grip of two very large, very human men. “You’re not touching her! You won’t even get near! Gwen, Gwennie, you run, do you hear? Gwennie, run!”

Gwen looked at him helplessly, and shook her head.

“Chip, I’m so sorry. It wouldn’t do any good. He’d only . . .” She trailed off into silence rather than explain further. What was even the point of explaining now? It could not undo anything. It might not even make Chip understand. Everything here that was happening now was older than time, and Chip had always struggled to grasp the notion of such things. Mum said it came of Chip being foreign. She didn’t say it in a mean way, but she did worry. Said their Gwennie needed a man who could keep his head about him. Gwen had told her not to fuss. At first she’d thought Chip’s perspective on life made him modern and daring and fun, but now . . . it only made her sad.

She looked up at Mr. Wiseman instead. Pleading, and unashamed of that.

“Tell them not to hurt him.”

“Gwen,” he said, and raised her knuckles to his lips. “I would sooner kill those men myself than deprive you of something you love.”

 _He’s telling the truth_ , she thought. Somehow it did not help. He could kill two men and find a dozen more. Trading in human lives like they were ha’pennies, and power like it was gold. From time out of mind, Mr. Wiseman had always been like that.

“Tell them,” she insisted. “The ones who hold him, and any who might follow you here. Say they are not to harm him. I want to hear it.”

He sighed, no more irritated than he was amused, and turned his impatient gaze to the men who held Chip so brutally between them, their hands biting into the flesh of his neck and arms while he struggled in vain to break free and fight his way to Gwen’s side.

“The man is not to be harmed so long as his wife will come to terms.” He turned back to twinkle at Gwen and give her hand a little squeeze. “Satisfied, Miss Dove?”

Gwen thinned her lips tightly shut and jerked her hand away.

“Mrs. Armour,” she corrected, and he laughed.

“Goodness, yes, do you know for a moment I had almost forgot? Looking into your eyes . . . it fair turns back time. But you’re not that little schoolgirl anymore, are you Gwen? Running over the downs and telling secrets to the trees, where anybody with a will to listen might overhear.” His eyes roamed pleasurably over her form. “No, you are quite grown up.”

Then he stood aside and gestured that she should precede him, through the back door and up the stairs. Gwen, seeing no hope, did as he bade her.

She did not look back.

~*~

The back stairs were narrow and creaking. They gave protest under Gwen’s ascent and Mr. Wiseman’s too. She marked the creak and groan, as familiar as end-of-day, a sound that was as much a part of home to her as anywhere had ever been. She hoped that whatever he took from her up there, he would not take the comfort of that.

Only one of his men followed them. Gwen noticed he was the one she’d marked as not altogether man. The smoothness of his presence, something like butter and stone, an odd combination that stood out from the more ordinary realities of her life, set him apart as such. But alone, now, with only Mr. Wiseman as contrast, he looked as dull and ordinary as muddy water running down the centre of a ditch in spring. Mr. Wiseman, in contrast, stood in the corridor as if nothing else in it were real. As if the closeness of the walls, the passageway so narrow two adults could not pass abreast, were merely illusion. As if Gwen herself, who lived here, slept here, made meals and served them and took her husband to bed here every night, were also make believe.

Only Mr. Wiseman was real.

Only he could be said to matter.

Gwen dug her nails into her palms in defiance of the thought.

“Is this it, Gwen?” he asked, still pleasant, so perfectly sure. Sure of himself, of his position, of his right to do this thing. Because he’d tricked Chip and Chip hadn’t known better and Chip lost something Mr. Wiseman had used to bait his trap, Mr. Wiseman had won. He got to take the only thing Chip had to his name that he had ever held in any interest.

He’d held her as that long before Gwen and Chip had even met.

She nodded, set her hand on the door handle, and her nerve failed. She couldn’t. Couldn’t do it. She dropped her hand and took a step away, trembling, chest heaving, and Mr. Wiseman acted at once to contain her. Boxed her in against the wall with his hands on either side of her head, staring down into her face, steady, strong.

“Ah, ah, Gwennie,” he said softly, chiding. “You’d regret it now, if you ran. I promise you that.”

She stared up at him, transfixed. He did not release her gaze but spoke to the man who was only mostly that, never taking his eyes from her.

“Clovis? The door.”

The door swung in, and Mr. Wiseman took her arm. Steered her through it like she could not be trusted to find her way, and released her only when the door behind them was shut. They stood together in the middle of Gwen’s entire world, their upstairs flat, bed-sit and kitchen in one room combined, with only the delicacy of a curtain drawn between sectors to delineate the rooms according to their purpose.

“Well,” he said warmly, “I must say it’s very nice.”

Gwen’s laughter, half sob, burbled out of her at that. It startled her. She put both hands up to her mouth to catch it, and Mr. Wiseman watched her, still greatly amused. Then he began to prowl. He poked around all through her home, examining the furnishings, looking into the ice box, and running his finger over the surface of the lower edge of the tallboy, which was the only really nice piece of furniture in the room. Gwen had inherited it from Gran, who had always refused to say how she had come by it.

With Gran, one knew if she wouldn’t tell it was best not to enquire.

“You have done well with what you have,” he decided, turning at last to face her. He stood as if it were he who had welcomed Gwen into his home, rather than forced his way into hers. “But you did not have much to work with, and look what it will cost you now.”

“It’s not your place to say,” Gwen said. Her voice was low and thick with the threat of tears, but Mr. Wiseman did not seem to mark it. Merely shrugged, indifferent to her suggestion that he had overstepped.

“You married an American, Gwennie. Your bad luck. A nice Welshman, he should have been, or perhaps a lad from the Highlands. A young man grown up on the cliffs of Cornwall, learning the things he’d need to know at his own granny’s knee; any of those would have known better, would they not, than to take a coin from me? They would have kept you safe and no two ways about it. But no! Our Gwennie had to catch the eye of a boy from away, and look where it’s got her.”

Gwen’s fists tangled in the thin print fabric of her apron. She shook with the _inhale, hold, exhale_ rhythm of her anger. Anger at Mr. Wiseman, yes, but also, more appalling, anger at Chip as well. At Chip for being foreign and handsome and somebody she loved, somebody she would die to protect, yet not somebody who knew you did not take coins from beautiful men with pretty manners and cold, dark eyes.

At being the reason she was going to have to do this.

“Don’t talk about him,” she whispered. “Please.”

Mr. Wiseman considered her a moment, thoughtful, unoffended, and at last gave a brisk nod.

“Of course. We can simply get on with it, if that suits you.” His eyes roamed over her figure. “He does not let you dress very well. But we can change that, if you like.”

“I want no favours from you!” Gwen spat, all fury and fear bunched up together, like her fingers in her apron, the tension drawing the fabric as taut as her nerves. “So don’t try to do me any!”

Mr. Wiseman laughed.

“Who says it was a favour for you?” Glittering mischief, edged with contempt, brightened his voice. “Perhaps I want something better looking to take to bed. Had that not occurred to you?”

Gwen’s cheeks burned hot. She fought the urge to hide them in her hands. Mr. Wiseman regarded her blush with open pleasure and flicked his forefinger, quite casually, in the direction of her dress.

“Let’s see how far down that pretty colour reaches.”

For a moment longer she stood, frozen. Her hands refused to rise, to untie the apron, to release the buttons. Her thoughts flew, irrelevantly, to the buttons themselves. They were four matching fabric buttons, covered in the same material as her dress, and one odd button made of horn. She’d not been able to find a suitable companion to the one she’d lost last spring so she had cut off the matching one at the bottom, moved it up, and tried to conceal the odd one with wide belts and, today, her apron. When she removed her apron he’d _see_ , and the indignity of being seen by Mr. Wiseman in her odd fifth button was suddenly more than Gwen could cope with. So she stood immobile, tears swimming in her eyes, obscuring the sight of him rising, so tall and elegant and handsome, and crossing to stand before her.

His hands, slim and of no particular temperature—not hot, not cold, just . . . hands. Smooth and lovely, the fingers long and refined—rose to her shoulders. She trembled under his touch, but did not resist as he slid the apron from her shoulders and relieved her of it with no effort whatsoever. Even Gwen sometimes got tangled in the wrap-around of her own apron, but the traitorous garment yielded to him with no difficulty at all. Then his fingers were at her collarbone, the top button was freed, and its fellow . . .

A cool draught kissed the skin he bared when the front of her dress fell open. She reached instinctively to tug up her vest, to cover herself, but he caught her hand in his; held it gently a moment before lifting it to press his lips to her knuckles.

“You should have a fire on,” he said. “There’s a chill in the air.” He looked searchingly into her face, so she was forced to see his loveliness; the parody of his concern. “Or can’t he afford that for you?”

In a fury she ripped her hand free and jerked away.

“Don’t speak of him!” she shrilled, her voice cracking on the second word. “Don’t! He—he wouldn’t—this is not—you’ve no right to speak of him!”

Mr. Wiseman simply inclined his head and indicated her open dress with a thoughtful forefinger. “You may want to close that,” he said. Then he raised his voice and called, “Clovis?”

Gwen barely had a moment to clutch her dress together and stand there, shaking, before the door to the stairs swung in and the man who was not as human as Gwen, not as otherworldly as Mr. Wiseman, appeared. Mr. Wiseman did not take his eyes from Gwen as he said, “Lay a fire on, would you? Mrs. Armour feels a chill.”

Clovis at once went to the hearth. Gwen could not make out what he did there, nor where he found the coal required. She was almost positive he hadn’t even touched the hearth itself, for he seemed to go a dreadful shade of green when he drew near it, and yet when he stepped back after a moment’s intercession it could not be denied that a good little fire blazed cheerfully in the grate.

“Thank you, Clovis,” said Mr. Wiseman, still regarding Gwen with a dreadful, pleasant steadiness. “That will be all.”

Clovis went out again. Mr. Wiseman reached out, took Gwen’s hand in his, and drew her over to the daybed. He gave her a smile—a terrible, gentle, friendly smile—and said,

“Now, why don’t you finish getting undressed? I’d like to look at you.”

She did as she was told. Her skin prickled hot and itchy at the cheeks and the back of her neck, and her hands were cold and damp, but she undid the rest of her buttons and let her dress puddle to the mattress around her hips. Then she stood, and it dropped to the floor. At his direction she peeled off her vest and panty girdle, and fought with every fibre of her dignity the urge to place her hands in some ineffective protective arrangement across the parts of her she most loathed to bare to him.

He smiled, like he understood and wanted to reassure her, but it was spoiled by the way he stared at her with such open pleasure.

 _Approval_.

He liked what he saw, and she hated knowing that.

“Very nice,” he said softly, and she wished he did not so clearly mean it. “Come here.”

His fingertip traced a cool, delicate path from one shoulder to the underside of her breast. The pad of his thumb pressed with proprietary firmness to the tip of one nipple, and rubbed it thoughtfully. She sucked in her breath at his touch, which pleased him.

“Oh, she likes that,” he said, and Gwen jerked back, alarmed.

“I don’t!” she said. “Why would you—don’t _say_ that! I don’t!”

“Gwen,” he laughed, “if the things I say are as offensive to you as that, how can you hope to cope with the things I will _do_?”

Gwen could not answer. She only looked away, trembling.

“How long have you been planning this?” she asked instead. “Was it . . . you said you watched me on the downs. Has it been as long as that?”

Mr. Wiseman considered her question. He put his lips to her breast and teased the nipple with his tongue. When he raised his face again to study hers, he looked almost as if he pitied her. As if he regretted the truth of what he was about to say.

“Time does not mean as much to me as it does to you, Gwen. One moment it might seem to my mind that I am raising up an army for the hunt in the field where this town will one day be. The next I am being beaten about the brow in a farmyard on my own land by an angry lass wielding an ash-wood staff and iron shears and the devil’s own temper besides, a firebrand of a girl who denies me the claim in trade I would make with her for her body living in a house on my own ground, a woman who calls me demon and evildoer and says she will take her own life before she gives me what I want. In one breath I am swearing myself true at her that if I cannot claim her body I will be back for the body of one she holds dear. Another breath drawn and she is an old woman, life nearly past, and I am watching a little girl learn the old ways at that old woman’s knee.”

He leaned in to let his breath wash over her, weight of wicked truth leaden in every word he spoke.

“When I see that little girl, Gwen, I know that there will be none in the world the woman loves more than this.”

Gwen shut her eyes against the scenes he spoke into life, but it was no use. As he said the words the images rose up, real and live around her, and she lived them in the moment as he had lived them then.

“The little girl grows. That process takes time as you know it, but time is nothing to me. She tells the rocks and trees her secrets and thanks to the old woman’s teachings she knows enough to make a daisy crown when she plays on the downs, but she has not been told what little good this will do a little girl when one of my kind wants her for his own.

“Then next . . . the next moment I watch that little girl, a woman fully grown, lose her head completely and make the mistake of a foolish, headstrong child. I watch her throw herself into the arms of a handsome lad who knows engines and shotguns and army tanks, but nothing of the true strength of iron. She hangs on his arm like an ornament, fragile and bound to fall. I see he has not the wit to keep her from her folly, and I know now it’s only a matter of the thing she calls time before I can buy her with my fairy gold, and in her body claim my right and my revenge.”

Gwen sagged against him, gasping, shaken, and only in that moment did she realize that under the spell of his story, in the span of time he had taken to tell it, he had slipped his hand over her thigh and pressed his thumb to the riot of curls tucked between them, stroking assiduously until a most terrible pressure had built and she came to herself the very moment it broke, washing over her with sweetness and unbearable pleasure, so that she had to put her face to the shoulder of his shirt and sob.

“Shh-hh,” Mr. Wiseman said, light and gentle and sing-song. He caught her behind the neck and eased her down on the bed, rising up over her like a god of nightmares, a lord of things too beneath him to even bother to claim. “You will like it, Gwen. I can see to that. You don’t need to worry. I can be gentle—”

But Gwen did not want him to. Did not want him sweet and tender, as her husband would be. Did not want him to take her to this bed she shared with her husband as if he were a lover courting, and she was someone he truly prized.

So she struck.

Seized the ticking clock that sat on the table by their bed, and struck a blow to his head. Rolled out from beneath him, weeping, wild, and fled to the door with a scream. She opened it to face the solid wall of Clovis. His person formed a stalwart, unmovable obstacle, his eyes boring down into the tearful wash of hers. He caught her by the arms and she dangled there, mute and unresisting, only crying softly onto her own naked chest.

“Don’t let her pass,” Mr. Wiseman panted, but the instruction was superfluous to fact. Gwen, at seeing Clovis, at seeing the horrible half-humanness of his form, understood that there could be no escape. One might delay for a time, but in the end a man like Mr. Wiseman would always come to collect his due.

Clovis turned her over to Mr. Wiseman and gently shut the door.

Mr. Wiseman dragged Gwen back to bed, a welt standing out on his head where she had struck the blow, and threw her down once more.

“Would you have me be unkind?” he challenged, pressing her body beneath him. “Is that it, Gwennie? Would you have me hurt you, leave marks on you, so that when your husband sees he knows you did not enjoy?” He pressed a kiss to her mouth, rough, brutal. “What if I _make_ you enjoy it? What then? Make your husband hear you cry my name, leave my marks on you as a reminder of his failure to protect; his failure to _please_ you as I did.”

Gwen fought, desperately, as much against his words as his actions. The way he reached down to unbutton the soft, luxurious stuff of his trousers gave her no greater alarm than the picture he painted with his voice.

“What if I wait under this window every night, hmm? What then?” Again he kissed her, with the kind of all-consuming force that made her senses reel. “Tell stories in his sleep so that he dreams it, sees it, _all_ that I am going to do to you.”

Gwen shook her head frantically, pleading, _no_. Not panic at the press of his flesh between her legs so much as the press of his threats on her mind. The idea of Chip seeing what she was living through now revolted her to the bottom of her soul.

“He will live it long after you’ve forgot.” He bore down on her, hard and hot as iron. Flesh made force. She parted for him against her will, yielded even though she fought. “An old man he’ll be, unable to sleep, hearing my voice in his mind. I’ll make him see everything I did to you, Gwen. He will live trapped in the prison of this one day of your life, the worst day of his.”

He was inside her. God, he was _inside_ her, her spirit and her flesh, and she felt that she would never be free.

“There will be no escape.”

She broke beneath him. Wept onto his shoulder as he thrust, surging up inside her, so different from Chip though the act itself were the same. She had no third to compare them to, no other man, they were the only two she had known in all her life and in that moment Mr. Wiseman’s greatest cruelty, his ultimate triumph, was that he made her long for a return to the day when she had not known either one.

He made her wish she had never met Chip, and she would never forgive him for it.

“There, now, Gwen,” he sighed, setting a rhythm to the act that, God help her, made her body sing. “Look at how sweet you can be, when you’re handled properly. Hmm? Is it really so bad, with me? The truth now, Mrs. Armour, and tell it quick, or I will remember that my guarantee of your husband’s safety was dependent on your willingness to submit, which I think we can fairly say you forgot, just then.”

He would have them hurt Chip if she did not speak. Gwen struggled to find it in her to lie, and found, to her horror, that she could not.

“It hurts,” she said instead, which was a kind of truth. Mr. Wiseman sighed and kissed the place where her collarbone dipped and swooped at the join of her neck.

“Where does it hurt, Gwen? What part of your body am I giving pain?”

She shut her eyes, burdened with the truth she could not explain. It was not her body he hurt; it was her soul. Her heart and her understanding and every part of her she had promised to Chip when they wed, that she could now never forget she had given, even under duress, to another.

She opened her eyes again, and Mr. Wiseman smiled at her as one who already knew.

“Here, my darling,” he said. “I will give you something to make it better.”

Before she could beg him to not, before she could swear that she would rather he strike her, shake her until he made her snap and rattle her teeth, beat her black and blue if only he would not make her _like_ it, he curled his fingers in a fist and ground the knucles slow and gentle at the very top of the spot where they joined.

Something sweet and terrible, like magic underground, built up inside her. Gwen gasped, her eyes shifting focus, and the second wave of pleasure broke. Hotter, fiercer, deeper than the first, this one seemed to come from the core of her, the heart of the Earth, and the depths of the sun all in one. She cried out, then cried, and at the sight of her surrender he snapped his hips forward and spent inside her with a low, satisfied groan.

After that he lay atop her, breathing hard. He kissed her nose, her eyelids, and mouth. Gwen lay beneath him, and wept.

~*~

Mr. Wiseman dressed beyond the curtain and gave Gwen the privacy of the bed. Her fingers, numb and unfeeling, fumbled the buttons of her dress but could not make them obey, so this meant that she was sitting there, unbuttoned, when he drew the curtain aside to look at her once more.

“Don’t tell me you were wanting another round,” he said, then laughed when she lifted her gaze dully to his. “Oh, Gwen. Come, now, it was not so bad as all that.” He crossed and knelt before her where she sat on the edge of her bed—how could she and Chip ever sleep here again?—and took the front of her dress in her hands. His fingers flew, nimble and sure, and he fastened her up at the front.

“You cannot tell me,” he told her, “that you did not enjoy that.”

Gwen looked down at him as if from a very great height, a terrible distance, and she wondered how much she would need to sacrifice, and to whom, to claim the right of his life.

“You cannot understand enjoyment,” she said, “if you think that.”

He shook his head and laughed again, charmed by her simple human folly. He stood up, away from her, and smiled.

“Gwen,” he said gently, “thank you. It has been long in coming, you might say, but for me it was worth the wait. I hope, with time, you will not mind as much. For I truly bear you no ill will, and I would offer you a gift, if you will have it. No conditions, no restrictions, an it harm me not or any I hold dear.”

“Dear?” Gwen spat, scornful. “What could you hold dear? You value nothing but what you take. I will take no gift from you.”

“Ah, well,” Mr. Wiseman spread his hands, palms up, a kind of _what will you do_ gesture of surrender. “I will not force one on you. Not twice.”

He might have smiled at her again, but Gwen had covered her face with both hands and remained seated on the bed as he left, so she could not say for sure. But once the door had shut behind him and she heard him descend to the shop, she removed her hands. She looked down at the buttons he had fastened for her and counted them: five.

Five cloth-covered buttons, perfectly matched, in pattern and size.

With a feral cry, a scream, Gwen tore them from her dress. She ripped all five buttons free and ran across the room to yank aside the screen on the hearth and fling them into the depths of the fire, where each went up in a little hiss and a puff of smoke.

She stood, shaking, the front of her dress again agape, guarding the surety of their ruin.

She was standing there still when she heard the sound, so pitifully quiet and unsure: the creak of Chip’s foot on the stair.

~*~


End file.
